The War Isn’t Over, But Israel Has Lost

Repeating behaviors that have produced catastrophic failures and expecting a different result is insane; and when a person’s psychotic behavior puts himself and those around him in immediate physical danger, the responsibility of those who claim to be his friends is to restrain him. But even as Waltz With Bashir shows in multiplexes across the world as a grim reminder of the precedent for Israel’s brutal march of folly in Gaza, the U.S. (and the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post) insist that there is a sanity and rationality to sending one of the world’s most powerful armies into a giant refugee camp to rend the flesh and crush the bones of those who stand in its way — whether in defiance or by being unlucky enough to have been born of the wrong tribe and be huddling in the wrong place. By fighting its way to their citadel, they would have us believe, Israel can destroy Hamas and usher in a golden age of peace. Or, to borrow from the casual callousness of Condi Rice during the last such display of futile brutality, we are witnessing, again, the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Israel failed in 2006, just as in 2002 and 1982. This time, they tell us, will be different.

And then the horror unfolds, as it always does — the hundreds of civilians accidentally massacred as they cowered in what they were told were places of safety, mocking Israel’s torrent of self congratulation over its restraint and its brilliant intelligence — and the hopelessly out-gunned enemy manages to survive, as he does every time. And by surviving, grows stronger politically. No matter how many are killed, the leaders targeted by Israel’s military are endlessly regenerated in the fertile soil of grievance and resentment born of the circumstances Israel has created. Circumstances it has created, but which it, and its most fervent backers refuse to acknowledge, much less redress.

Arafat is dead and gone. So are Sheikh Yassin, and Rantissi. And Abbas al-Musawi, and Imad Mughniyeh. Israel’s ruthless efficiency at killing the leaders of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups is second to none, and yet, no matter who it kills, there are always thousands more, ready to declare, “I am Spartacus”. That’s because those who step up to lead these organizations are acting not out of personal ambition — leadership in Hamas is a death sentence. The endless stream of Palestinians willing to sacrifice themselves in the role, then, is a symptom of the condition of their people. And Israel’s leaders know this. Asked when running for Prime Minister a decade ago what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian, Ehud Barak — the man directing the current operation in Gaza — answered bluntly, “I’d have joined a terror organization.”

By the logic of his own instinct on the campaign trail in 1999, Ehud Barak should know that Operation Cast Lead in Gaza cannot succeed, except, perhaps, in reviving his own political prospects. No matter how many leaders, militants and ordinary civilians Israel kills in Gaza, Hamas — or something like it — will survive.

Waltz With Bashir — a movie that had to be made in Israel, I venture, because questioning Israeli militarism would have been deemed “anti-Semitic” in Hollywood — reminds us that, in 1982, Ariel Sharon led an invasion of Lebanon supposedly aimed at stopping attacks on northern Israel, advancing all the way to Beirut in order to crush the PLO. Sure, the PLO was driven out of Beirut and exiled to Tunisia, but the Israelis were forced within six years to begin negotiating with it because of the uprising of the youth of the West Bank and Gaza. Lebanon in 1982 was a brutal and ultimately futile campaign that delivered only the brutal images of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila around which the movie centers.

Since 1982, of course, Israel has laid siege to and bombed nearly every major Palestinian city, killing and imprisoning thousands of Palestinians, blundering into Lebanon again in 2006 and killing another thousand Lebanese, repeatedly bombed Gaza and choked off its economy for much of the past three years, and yet, nothing has changed: They have killed some 700 in Gaza now, and still the rockets come; regardless of the state of its structures, Hamas is politically stronger on the Palestinian street, while those Palestinian leaders who have cooperated with Israel and the U.S. are weaker and more discredited than ever. The Israelis — and their backers in the American political establishment — appear incapable of grasping that which is empirically obvious: Hamas and its ilk grow stronger every time Israel seeks to eliminate them by force.

II. Dangerous Illusions and a War of Choice

“But what choice did Israel have?” say those in its amen corner in the U.S. “No normal society would tolerate rocket fire on its territory. Hamas left it no option.”

Well, actually, as Jimmy Carter explains from first-hand experience, Israel had plenty of alternatives and chose to ignore them, because it remains locked into the failed U.S.-backed policy of trying to overturn the democratic verdict of the 2006 Palestinian election that made Hamas the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority. The primary Israeli-U.S.-European strategy here (tacitly backed by Arab autocrats from Mubarak to Mahmoud Abbas) has been to apply increasingly strict economic sanctions, in the hope that choking off the chances of a decent life for the 1.5 million people of Gaza would somehow force them to reverse their political choice. Collective punishment, in other words. So, even when Hamas observed a cease-fire between June and November, Israel refused to open the border crossings. When the exchange of fire began again on November 5 when Israel raided what it said was a Hamas tunnel, Hamas escalated its rocket fire but made clear that it would restore and extend the cease-fire if Israel agreed to open the border crossings. Israel’s answer, Carter explains, was if Hamas ceased firing, Israel would allow 15% of the normal traffic of goods into Gaza. And it’s any surprise that Hamas was not prepared to settle for just a 15% loosening of the economic stranglehold?

Hamas appeared to believe that creating a crisis would force Israel to agree to new terms. Whether this was a mistaken belief or not actually remains to be seen: If the truce that ends Israel’s Operation Cast Lead leaves Hamas intact and includes the lifting of the siege, it will claim vindication. Even now, Israeli leaders continue to insist, idiotically, that Hamas cannot be allowed to achieve any diplomatic gains as a result of any truce that must, of necessity, require its diplomatic cooperation. Just as in 2006, the Israelis have achieved the exact opposite political result to what they intended: They have made it abundantly obvious, even to the incoming U.S. administration, that the policy of trying to isolate Hamas is spectacularly dysfunctional, and will have to be abandoned as a matter of urgency.

Even as the realization begins to dawn that their adversary, once again, will emerge politically stronger from a military pummeling, the Israelis contemplate one last bloody foray into the heart of Gaza City, hoping that military action can weaken Hamas and force it to surrender to Israel’s terms. Some American policymakers even cling to the fantasy that they can reimpose the regime of the pliant Mahmoud Abbas on Gaza — a pathetic fantasy, to be sure, because close observers of Palestinian politics know that the only thing keeping Abbas in charge of the West Bank, right now, is the presence of the Israeli Defense Force, and it’s willingness to lock up his opponents. Conveniently, for example, Abbas doesn’t have to deal with his own legislature, which is dominated by Hamas, because Israel has locked up most of the legislators. Mahmoud Abbas has allowed himself to be turned into a Palestinian Petain, and even much of the rank and file of his own Fatah party has turned against him. Not even the Israelis believe he could control Gaza without them, and they are not inclined to stay.

If Hamas is not allowed to govern in Gaza, chances are that nobody will govern in Gaza. It will look more like Mogadishu than like the West Bank — a chaotic cauldron run by rival warlords, with Hamas — no longer responsible for governance — the most powerful political-military presence (although al-Qaeda will fancy its chances of setting up shop if the Hamas government is overthrown — Hamas is the greatest bulwark against Bin Laden’s crowd gaining a foothold in Gaza).

III. Palestinian Sovereignty

The other trope being desperately worked by Israel’s cheering section is the idea that this is simply another episode of a regional conflict between Israel and its mortal foe, Iran. Hamas, we are told, by many media outlets that ought to know better, is a “proxy of Iran”. This is simply not the case, and sober regional analysts know it: Hamas is certainly dependent on Iranian cash in Gaza, although those Western and Israeli strategic geniuses who deprived it of all other sources of funding ought not be surprised that Hamas turned for funds to those who would offer them. No doubt it will take whatever military assistance it was offered, too. But Hamas shares neither ideology nor the kind of political relationship with Iran that Hizballah does, in Lebanon. Hamas was the creation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, originally, and its political decision making is entirely independent of Iran. Syria is more politically influential over Hamas, of course, and Syria is hardly a proxy of Iran despite their alliance — if it was, why would the U.S. be working so hard on a diplomatic strategy to break that alliance? Moreover, the idea of Iran on some sort of path of confrontation with Israel is something of a phantom. Sure, Ahmadinejad loves to warn that Israel will disappear, but he, and his superior, have long made clear that Iran has no intention of attacking Israel. And you’d think that those who insist that Iran’s mullahs exist in order to destroy Israel, even at the cost of their own survival (you know, the argument that the iranians are so ideologically committed to Israel’s destruction that normal deterrence policies won’t restrain them) might want to answer this question: Why has Hizballah refrained from firing its massive arsenal of rockets at Israel as it butchers Palestinians in Gaza? Israel tells us they have the means, and there’s no doubt they have the implacable rage. Could the answer be that this Iranian proxy is being restrained by the pragmatic concern for its own survival and progress in Lebanon? And if so, what does this tell us about Iran? Then again, Iran is not especially relevant to the conflict in Gaza.

Nor was the crisis there created by the militancy of Hamas; instead, it’s the final bloody chapter in the failed Bush Administration-Israeli strategy to overthrow Hamas. The alternative to war, ignored by Israel but patently obvious, is simple: It will have to negotiate with Hamas. (And spare me the “but Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist” argument: No Palestinian leader would, if offered the chance to reverse history, allow Israel to have come into existence, for the simple reason that Israel’s emergence was the Palestinian Nakbah, the catastrophe that dispossessed them and made them refugees. Israel started talking to the PLO long before its charter was revised to allow for recognizing Israel; its leaders realized that Israel could not be militarily defeated. Many in Hamas have come to the same conclusion; Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, argues that Hamas is moving towards acceptance of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. The Americans are simply going to have to let go of the idea that they’re going to negotiate with a Palestinian leadership that answers to them, as Mahmoud Abbas does, rather than one that answers to the Palestinian public.)

As Oxford-based Israeli historian Avi Shlaim writes:

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel’s propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel’s terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

Shlaim introduces us to the deeper flaw in the “no normal society would tolerate rocket fire” reasoning: Israel, quite simply, is not a normal society. It is a country without fixed legal borders, and the disputes over where those borders should be drawn — the basic conflict not over religion or ideology, but over land and power — is at the very epicenter of the current clash in Gaza, and of Israel’s never-ending series of wars with those around it.

One can only hope, with great fervor, that Barak Obama has heeded the wisdom of his foreign policy tutor Brent Scowcroft, whose observations about the folly of the Bush Administration backing Israel’s 2006 campaign against Hizballah apply as much to today’s offensive in Gaza: “Hezbollah is not the source of the problem,” Scowcroft wrote in the Washington Post. “It is a derivative of the cause, which is the tragic conflict over Palestine that began in 1948. The eastern shore of the Mediterranean is in turmoil from end to end, a repetition of continuing conflicts in one part or another since the abortive attempts of the United Nations to create separate Israeli and Palestinian states in 1948.”

If that were true in Lebanon, it’s even more so in Gaza. To understand everything from why Hamas refuses to recognize the State of Israel; why it fights by means both fair and terribly foul; and why it won Gaza by a landslide in the 2006 election; a good starting point is the demographic composition of the strip — 80% of today’s Gazans are refugee families, who were driven out of homes and off land they owned inside what is now Israel in 1948, and forbidden by one of the founding laws of the State of Israel from ever returning. Is it any surprise then that the basic default position of Palestinian politics has always been to refrain from “recognizing” Israel in the sense of simply abandoning their own claims to homes and land stolen from them by Israel’s very creation. Sure, Israel can say it won the war of 1948, and to the victor the spoils. But what would Ehud Barak do if it had been his father or grandfather who’d been forced off a farm in Ashkelon and now found himself in the hellhole of Gaza? You already know his answer.

And that answer will remain the same (even if Barak would never dream of admitting it any longer) as long as justice and dignity is denied to the community that gave rise to Hamas.

What Operation Cast Lead has revealed in stark and brutal terms, is that Israel’s leadership is incapable of transcending the dysfunctional patterns that lock it into a morbid cycle that precludes Middle East stability. Israel is moving steadily to the right politically — even when the center-left was in power and negotiating with the Palestinians, settlements on occupied land expanded at a steady clip; no Israeli government for the foreseeable future is going to withdraw from the West Bank to the Green Line. So, if the madness is to be stopped, Israel and the Palestinians will have to be told where their borders are, as part of an internationally enforced, fair settlement that gives the parties no choice, and provides the Turkish troops to enforce it. But hey, I’m not holding my breath…

137 Responses to The War Isn’t Over, But Israel Has Lost

Happy days – the Israeli movie Waltz with Bashir is raking in the tributes. Having done us proud and won the Golden Globe, it’s now a prime Oscar contender. Already under its belt is the Israel Film Academy’s Ophir. It was singled out as the best animation feature by LA’s film critics and was an unexpected box office hit in its recent theatrical release in America.

This presumably should make us ever-so-joyful. The much-maligned Jewish state, after all, craves honors, even when they effectively dishonor it.

To figure this out we might recall the Hanover-born philosopher Theodor Lessing, who was assassinated by Hitler’s agents in 1933. The man who delved into the warped Jewish psyche and produced the still eminently germane volume entitled Der Judische Selbsthass – Jewish self-hate – deserves attention, especially as Israelis daily disprove his optimistic prognosis.

Born into an assimilationist family, Lessing converted to Christianity, as was the vogue among his contemporary up-and-coming young German-Jewish sophisticates. But then, deeply affected by anti-Semitism and passionately moved by the Zionist ethos of Jewish national revival, he recanted, returned to Judaism, visited pre-independence Israel and theorized that only in its environment of a healthy normal Jewish existence, can Jews stop hating themselves.

That’s how much he knew!

Back then, three years before the Third Reich’s birth (and, as it emerged, three years before his own unnatural death), he took it upon himself to painfully pick at the most intractable of Jewish scabs – the maddening capacity of Jews to loathe themselves or, more precisely, to loathe their fellow Jews. He ascribed this inclination to two millennia of abnormal persecuted existence. He assumed that the normalization, which Zionism took upon itself to achieve, would eradicate the aberration. It was a sound hypothesis, except that perhaps Lessing and Zionism underestimated the profound psychological deformity which 2,000 years of anomaly wrought.

THAT CROSSED my mind when Waltz won the Globe. In concept and execution this peculiar animated hybrid perhaps breaks with convention, but its central thematic core is every bit as predictable, cravenly conformist and run of the mill as nearly all Israeli flicks of the past few decades.

The Arab is revealed as the antithesis to the inherently disagreeable, fatigued, befuddled, farcical, foolish and/or pathetic Israeli. Arabs are devoted patriots, confident in their cause, outspoken in their righteous indignation, vindicated in their umbrage, noble, proud, tough, young, vigorous and deserving of victory.

Some occasional counterfeit cardboard dichotomies are tolerable – freedom of expression and all that rot. However, when simplistic falsehoods become the single premise, then the overbearing presence of pressure by manipulative groupthink must at least be suspected. The utter lack of deviation from this one homogeneous portraiture-style testifies to the imposition of ideological diktats, obviously in the name of democracy and artistic free-will.

Misgivings are further intensified when we realize how many of these one-dimensional productions are subsidized by the Education Ministry’s Israel Film Fund. Portions of our hard-earned incomes go – as taxes collected from you and me – to underwrite either outright slander of the Jewish state or, at best, unsympathetic depictions of a bumbling imbecilic entity.

No government dares reduce officialdom’s largesse to Israel’s self-appointed creative ambassadors, who blithely batter their country’s image at any available film festival abroad. Hand-in-hand with omnipotent media cliques, our artistes vehemently orchestrate intimidating reputation-trashing onslaughts which no higher-up or administration in recent memory could withstand.

And so, willing or not, we bankroll them and, at our expense, they relish in thumbing their avant-garde noses at the “benighted” aggregate of ordinary Israelis who are denied other homegrown cinematic fare, certainly anything Zionist. Since nothing pro-Israeli can win accolades at Cannes or Berlin, the preferences of overseas nabobs must be pandered to in our filmmakers’ quest for fame and fortune. Thus, to bask in the limelight of enlightened foreign approval, Israelis enhance the fraudulent Arab narrative. Pleasing the enemy is the one surefire way to make it in Israeli showbiz.

THIS STATE of affairs, after 60 years of Jewish sovereignty, would have shocked the Zionist in Lessing. Nevertheless, Lessing the scholar would have easily been able to fit the Israeli strain of “the old Jewish disease” into his painstakingly compiled typology of self-hating Jews.

In essence Lessing noted that Jews are unique in their self-deprecation, yet it’s such second-nature that they seldom acknowledge the condition. Non-Jews would never dream of harboring such scorn for themselves.

Excessively moralistic and idiosyncratically contrary, Jewish intellectuals are predisposed to self-blame, even when not remotely guilty of whatever inequity they ascribe to their people. This meshes flawlessly with the historically honed and religiously indoctrinated propensity of non-Jews to scapegoat Jews. But uber-brainy Jewish suck-ups, stopping at nothing to ingratiate themselves, invariably praise those who despise and target them.

They demonstrate an inexhaustible aptitude for understanding visceral antagonism toward themselves and identifying with the antagonists’ rationale. It’s a combination of their contempt for their own kind and their hankering to be accepted by those who abhor them. That, in a nutshell, is the Jew’s predilection for forsaking his own heritage and his longing for another identity.

Zionist Israel has usurped Judaism, Jewish, and Jews in a hypocritical and violent project to exterminate Palestine and Palestinians. Perhaps 80% of Jews support Israel and its barbaric actions. These facts alone call for self examination of the basic tenets of Zionism and the “chosen people” mythology of Judaism. Antagonism towards those who identify with and perpetrate the slaughter of children trapped in Gaza is natural for a human being of conscience.

Your eloquent words miss the point entirely. Judaism’s special and separate ideology embedded within Zionism is the source of Jewish angst, and perhaps anti-semitism. You claim to be exempt from common decency and international law because you are Jewish, and wonder why some Jews and many Gentiles notice this hypocrisy.

Your condemnation of critical perspectives and questions will not silence men and women of conscience, whether Jew or Gentile.

We all need to remember Israel is fighting a PR war, blogs like this one has trained people to defend the killings in Gaza. We also need to understand today Jews aren’t the Jews of the old testament, they are the Jews that follow the Tulmud, and evil book written by men for men. Just google Tulmud see how evil it is.

True.
The problem is that they know what they are doing.
This will go on until there are no more Palestinians.
It is a war of attrition.
Eventually the jew/nazis will kill or chase them all away and take all their land.
The world will watch and cry and watch tv and drink beer and eat pizza.

Seems to me that in the long run, Israel will morph into a Palestian state with remaining Jews in control of the economy under Arab political rule. Let European countries which caused this horrible situation in the middle east the the US which supported it all along, absorb those who choose to leave Israel. There’ll be no bloodbath of Jews as in the case of South Africa. Jews have lived in Muslim lands for centuries in peace and prosperity, albeit as second class citizens in many cases.
The Jews and their contribution to the world in arts and sciences will flourish in Palestine and elsewhere free of their nationalist/racist and militarist regime. And many Jews living this nightmare outside Israel
will have good reason to feel Jewish
again.

I have been worried to death about the fate of the Holyland, always arguing with my friends about defending her at all costs.Then one cousin sent me some alternative documentation about the history not talked about in the US media.I am really in shock that we have been deliberately lied to. Some things I’ve learned;1)the influence that AIPAC/ADL/MOSAAD has inside our government is scary. 2) Israel has NOT been a loyal friend to us; just last year the Israeli foreign minister said that the greatest disaster in US/Israeli relations was when former IDF/MOSAAD operatives were caught red-handed bugging/hacking/tapping the communications of over 200 top secret US corporations and handing their info over to Israeli companies.3)Israel is the main enemy of free speech in the US 4)Israel was founded by a group of terrorists/mafiosi/gangsters( not the Messiah as Prophecy says 5)the worlds most famous terrorist-Abu Nidal- was in fact a MOSAAD agent all along-to make all Palestinians appear to be terrorists. 6) the entire world seems to be aware that the REAL TERRORISTS are the israelis- holding the world hostage with its 200+ nukes- I have been brainwashed my whole life by this vast network of Zionist Media Moguls!Wow!

if hamas and fatah are so tired of being “brutalized” by Israel, why don’t they just defeat Israel??? …oh right they can’t. so if the world outcry to help hamas and fatah is so strong why don’t they help them defeat Israel? hmmmm …. no answer?!? no one is interested in helping the gaza citizens, except to reveal their own hidden anti-semitism..

Israel and supporters are surprised that Egypt conducts war games with the IDF being the advesary.
Israel as attacked Egypt more than once,with “self defence” as justification.With escaping Egypt being the center of Mosiac Law and reviled,makes one wonder if indoctrination of Hebrew tenets might not also be an obstacle to peace.Expansion under cover of war has been Israel’s modus operandi.I believe Israeli policy makers want to force an Exodus of Palestinians from the Gaza Ghetto into Egypt.Egypt keeps it’s Gaza border tightly shut!New report shows Israel targetted Palestinian civillians with drone attacks in recent Gaza 2008 offensive.More sophistacted than the poisining of Palestinain wells by Jewish paramiltary forces in 1948,but serves to sow fear in populace.

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I really feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, when you gain competence, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me.

By the logic of his own instinct on the campaign trail in 1999, Ehud Barak should know that Operation Cast Lead in Gaza cannot succeed, except, perhaps, in reviving his own political prospects. No matter how many leaders, militants and ordinary civilians Israel kills in Gaza, Hamas — or something like it — will survive.

The Arab world is immense, yet no other Arab country on the planet is willing to take Palestinian refugees or treat them as ordinary citizens-or in the case of Gadaffi, expels them when the PLO tried to make peace with Israel. Hamas soldiers murdered Fatah government workers when they took over the Gaza strip immediately after the IDF disengaged and forcibly removed all the settlers. Hamas terrorists have taken pains to put Palestinian citizens in the line of fire when Hamas is targeted by IDF operations. Hamas has refused to acknowledge the State of Israel in the first place-and you can be damn sure that in Apartheid South Africa there were no shopping malls or seaside mansions in the ‘tribal homelands.’

The Arab world (specifically their leaders) see Israel as a sort of boogeyman, the living embodiment of their failures to become successful countries, in spite of the fact that they are swimming in oil wealth. They use its existence as a reason to suppress their people and enforce theocratic law. Everybody from Bangladesh to Algeria looks the other way when Turkey murders a few hundred Kurds, Sudan murders its indigenous population or Iran suppresses Baha’i worshipers. But when Israel responds to a rocket attack or tries to stop the importation of weaponry into a lawless territory, they become surrogate Nazis? If Quebec or Ireland started firing rockets into Canada or the U.K., you can bet there would be blood. Their is clear unfairness here.

Why is Israel so different? Ten million Germans were driven out of their ancestral homes at the end of World War 2, but they somehow survived and were repatriated into normal society. But the Arab states are too afraid to admit their own failure to let the Palestinians live amongst them. The truth is, the Arab states need this war to justify their Shariah governments and maintain a constant State of Emergency to prop up their rotten dictatorships-just look at how Gadaffi and the Assads treat their little insurrections: they blamed Israel. And until they are forced to respect Israel and admit its right to exist, they will remain its enemies.

Nabil El conquest Saath top officials, the U.S., the UN Security Council members, a negative vote on the request for membership by printing on the Palestinians, trying to use his veto authority, he said.

Geologists in the Afghan desert south of the approximately one million tons, including lanthanum, cerium and neodymium rare elements, such as where the detected mineral deposits. “ScientificAmercian.com” According to the website, which are rare in Afghanistan, the discovery of underground riches of the countries with the sixth s?ramalas?nda ranks.

The Arab world is immense, yet no other Arab country on the planet is willing to take Palestinian refugees or treat them as ordinary citizens-or in the case of Gadaffi, expels them when the PLO tried to make peace with Israel. Hamas soldiers murdered Fatah government workers when they took over the Gaza strip immediately after the IDF disengaged and forcibly removed all the settlers. Hamas terrorists have taken pains to put Palestinian citizens in the line of fire when Hamas is targeted by IDF operations. Hamas has refused to acknowledge the State of Israel in the first place-and you can be damn sure that in Apartheid South Africa there were no shopping malls or seaside mansions in the ‘tribal homelands.’

Germany opened in the ozone layer over the North Pole, and scientists concerned about five times the size of the hole. American Aviation and Space Agency (NASA) website in the article and published in the journal Nature, an unusually cold temperatures in the Arctic, this record-size hole that led up to last April, 15 days in Eastern Europe, Russia and Mongolia on the travels of the hole of the people living in these regions high degree of ultraviolet (UV) radiation exposure of humans leads were recorded.